{"title":"Doing style for Saraswati Puja: Girlhood, Class, and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam","authors":"Nirmali Goswami, Navarupa Bhuyan","doi":"10.1177/14687968241229749","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning, is organised by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. We draw on debates on girlhood, codes of respectable femininity in a neoliberal world, and how these play out for Muslim girls in the school context. These ideas frame our analysis of the dressing up practice among Muslim girls in a government school. We argue that the middle-class and ethnicised ideals of girlhood are amplified and reconfigured by the popular discourses on Saraswati Puja and add to the tensions over the appropriate code of dressing within the context of Puja at school. While the reality of girls’ lives is being shaped in novel ways, the Muslim girls engagement with the ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ through varied modes of ‘doing style’ put them under contrary pressures in public places like school. In such a scenario, their accounts of dressing up and participating in this event serve as a vantage point to understand how girlhood is being construed and experienced from varied positions of class, caste, age, and community. These accounts highlight Muslim girls’ engagement with the codes of femininity in the majoritarian cultural universe of a school.","PeriodicalId":47512,"journal":{"name":"Ethnicities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ethnicities","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968241229749","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ETHNIC STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning, is organised by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. We draw on debates on girlhood, codes of respectable femininity in a neoliberal world, and how these play out for Muslim girls in the school context. These ideas frame our analysis of the dressing up practice among Muslim girls in a government school. We argue that the middle-class and ethnicised ideals of girlhood are amplified and reconfigured by the popular discourses on Saraswati Puja and add to the tensions over the appropriate code of dressing within the context of Puja at school. While the reality of girls’ lives is being shaped in novel ways, the Muslim girls engagement with the ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ through varied modes of ‘doing style’ put them under contrary pressures in public places like school. In such a scenario, their accounts of dressing up and participating in this event serve as a vantage point to understand how girlhood is being construed and experienced from varied positions of class, caste, age, and community. These accounts highlight Muslim girls’ engagement with the codes of femininity in the majoritarian cultural universe of a school.
期刊介绍:
There is currently a burgeoning interest in both sociology and politics around questions of ethnicity, nationalism and related issues such as identity politics and minority rights. Ethnicities is a cross-disciplinary journal that will provide a critical dialogue between these debates in sociology and politics, and related disciplines. Ethnicities has three broad aims, each of which adds a new and distinctive dimension to the academic analysis of ethnicity, nationalism, identity politics and minority rights.